1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to techniques for managing resources on distributed computer systems, and more particularly, to a system and method for managing resources for provisioning media services in future Internet utilities environments for the delivery of multimedia content.
2. Discussion of the Prior Art
The next generation of the Internet provides future applications with the opportunity to leverage resources across widely distributed resources via its ability to provide quality of service (QoS), large bandwidth connectivity (e.g., very-high-performance Backbone Network Service or vBNS), differentiated services (diff-serv), and unique addressing (e.g., IPv6). To applications, this blend of technologies introduces the notion of virtual proximity, i.e., the logical and apparent proximity of widely distributed resources to applications. For applications to make efficient use of these resources, mechanisms are needed to distribute the resulting uncoordinated application load presented by millions such applications to these resources. However, the task of resource management across widely distributed media servers across the Internet is not yet well understood and has been recognized as an emergent issue in the literature.
At the same time, an emerging set of computer utilities is foreseen. Some examples of these new service utilities are concepts such as Internet TV and radio, to name a few. The nature of a service utility is centered on the engineering of distribution channels. In traditional distribution channels such as the telephone network, control of the distribution is achieved via over-engineering and statistical multiplexing of resources. Until now, several reasons have discouraged over-engineering of resources over the Internetxe2x80x94those being primarily, medium properties at high load (e.g., burstiness and unpredictability) and, the lack of a central administration to enable the over-engineering of end-to-end resources. With the emergence of virtual proximity, a new paradigm is possible in which statistical over-engineering of end-to-end resources is now desirable.
The task of leveraging the increased availability of widely distributed content and resources becomes very important with the proliferation of the next generation of the Internet, e.g., Internet2. There are a number of publications and patents in the area of QoS-driven resource management. Most of the work has been focused on either the network, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,388,097 issued Feb. 7, 1995 to Baugher, M. J. et al., and entitled xe2x80x9cSystem and Method for Bandwidth Reservation for Multimedia Traffic in Communication Networks,xe2x80x9d and U.S. Pat. No. 5,581,703 issued Dec. 3, 1996 to Baugher, M. J. et al, and entitled xe2x80x9cMethod and Apparatus for Reserving System Resources to assure Quality of Servicexe2x80x9d; or, the operating system, such as described in the reference xe2x80x9cAn Architecture Towards Efficient OS Support for Distributed Multimediaxe2x80x9d, Proceedings of ISandT/SPIE Multimedia Computing and Networking Conference ""96, San Jose, Calif., January 1996 by David K. Y. Yau and Simon S. Lam. With the proliferation of multimedia services on Internet, it was soon realized that while IP networks were able to provide a simple, best-effort delivery service, the IP protocol is not suited for use with new real-time applications, such as multimedia streaming, Virtual Reality applications, distributed supercomputing. As a result, new network protocols, such as Resource Reservation Setup Protocol (RSVP) (See, e.g., xe2x80x9cThe Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure,xe2x80x9d Edited by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, Chapter 19, pp. 379-503, Morgan Kauffman Publishers, 1999); Real Time Transport Protocol (RTP); Real Time Transport Control Protocol (RTCP) and others, were developed (See, e.g., William Stallings, xe2x80x9cHigh-Speed Networks: TCP/IP and ATM Design Principlesxe2x80x9d, Prentice Hall, 1997; and, I. Busse, B. Deffner, and H. Schulzrinne, xe2x80x9cDynamic QoS Control of Multimedia Applications based on RTPxe2x80x9d, Computer Communications, January 1996), enabling applications to request and negotiate network QoS parameters, such as bandwidth and latency. Deployment of those protocols on the current Internet has not been successful, firstly because it required upgrading all the non-RSVP routers and servers system software. Secondly, even if RSVP were deployed on the current Internet, very limited bandwidth and computing resources would still have been the bottleneck for successful deployment of real-time applications. The current Internet was built on the backbone, enabling cross-country communications on relatively unclogged T3 (45 megabit per second). Proliferation of graphic pages, and streaming audio and video applications depleted those resources quite fast. Even worse, the rate of user""s population growth is considerably higher than newly build network resources.
The National Science Foundation and MCI Corporation, responding to the emerging needs of Internet community has been building a new network, called the very-high-performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS). This nationwide network also provides a backbone for the two foundations, university-led effort called Internet 2 and by federal research agencies, called New Generation Internet.
The VBNS allows most of the connected institutions to run at 622 million bits per second (OC12). By the year 2000, vBNS is expected to operate at 2.4 gigabits per second (2,400 megabits per second) by the year 2000.
The vBNS system exploits RSVP protocol to support two distinct classes of services: a Reserved Bandwidth Service, i.e. a service with bandwidth commitment, and a traditional best-effort IP service (See, e.g., Chuck Song, Laura Cunningham and Rick Wilder, xe2x80x9cQuality of Service Development in the vBNSxe2x80x9d, MCI Communications Corporation, provided at the URL http://www.vbns.net/presentations/papers/QoSDev/ieeeqos.htm. Still, resource management at the network layer for vBNS is done separately from operating system layer and in isolation from application needs and availability of the end-resources, such as storage and computing resources.
A new breed of high performance applications such as remote surgery, robotics, tele-instrumentation, automated crisis response, digital libraries of satellite data, distance learning via multimedia supported Web sites, enhanced audio, and video, is emerging. However, to accommodate such high performance applications and their continuous media flows, it is not enough to increase or reserve network capacity. These new applications require end-to-end resource reservation and admission control, followed by co-ordination of distributed functions such as: (a) resource scheduling (e.g., CPU, disk, etc.) at the end-system(s), (b) packet scheduling and flow control in the network, and (c) monitoring of the delivered end-to-end quality of service. It is essential that quality of service is configurable, predictable and maintainable system-wide, including the end-system devices, communications subsystem, and networks. Furthermore, all end-to-end elements of distributed systems architecture must work in unison to achieve the desired application level behavior.
Up do date, there has been considerable effort in the development of end-to-end quality of service support. Among them are Heidelberg QoS Model, developed within HeiProject at IBM""s European Networking Center and described in the reference entitled xe2x80x9cHeiRATxe2x80x94Quality of Service Management for Distributed Multimedia Systemsxe2x80x9d, Multimedia Systems Journal, 1996 by Volg, C., Wolf, L., Herrtwich, R. And H. Wittig; an Extended Integrated Reference Model (XRM), developed by COMET group at Columbia University such as described in the reference entitled xe2x80x9cBuilding Open Programmable Multimedia Networksxe2x80x9d, Computer Communications Journal, Vol. 21, No. 8, pp. 758-770, June 1998 by Campbell, A. T., Lazar, A. A., Schulzinne, H. And R. Stadler; OMEGA end-point architecture, developed as the interdisciplinary research effort in the University of Pennsylvania such as described in the reference entitled xe2x80x9cDesign, Implementation and Experiences of the OMEGA End-Point Architecturexe2x80x9d, Technical Report (MS-CIS-95-22), University of Pennsylvania, May 1995 by Nahrstedt K. And J. Smith; in-serv Architecture which is a contribution of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) such as described in the reference entitled xe2x80x9cA Framework for End-to-End QoS Combining RSVP/Intserv and Differentiated Services,xe2x80x9d Internet Draft, IETF, March 1998 by Bernet Y, et al.; the Quality of Service Architecture QoS-A, developed by A. Campbell, and presenting an integrated framework dealing with end-to-end QoS requirements such as described in the reference entitled xe2x80x9cA Quality of Service Architecturexe2x80x9d, PhD thesis, Lancaster University, January 1996 by Andrew T Campbell. Another reference which analyzes the above mentioned QoS paper is entitled xe2x80x9cA Survey of QoS Architecturesxe2x80x9d, ACM/Springer Verlag, Multimedia Systems Journal, Special Issue on QoS Architecture, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 138-151, May 1998 by Aurrecoechea, C., Campbell, A. T. and L. Hauw.
Substantial work has been done by SRI International, developing an End-to-End Resource Management of Distributed Systems (ERDoS), which enables adaptive, end-to-end, scalable resource management of distributed systems such as described in the reference ERDOS QoS Architecture, Technical Report, SRI International, May 1998. An extensible Resource Specification Language (RSL) and the resource management architecture has been implemented within Globus meta-computing toolkit, and used to implement a variety of different resource management strategies such as described in Czajkowski, K., et al., xe2x80x9cA Resource Management Architecture for Metacomputing Systemsxe2x80x9d Proc. IPPS/SPDP ""98 Workshop on Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing, 1998; and Foster, I., Kesselman, C., xe2x80x9cThe Globus Product: A Status Reportxe2x80x9d Proc. IPPS/SPDP ""98 Heterogeneous Computing Workshop, pp. 4-18, 1998.
While the architectures described in the above-mentioned references are directed resource reservation and management of end-to-end resources, they generally assume a single, even geographically limited network subsystem which provides bounds on delay, errors and meet bandwidth demands, and an operating system which is capable of providing run time QoS guarantees. However, the next generation Internet must be viewed not as only a network of networks, but first and foremost a system of distributed systems. In this paradigm, not only the communication resources, but also the computing and storage servers are shared among many users.
Thus, the architectures mentioned above do not provide a coordinated management of overall system resources as a function of request activities for individual content and computing resources. It deals with resources pre-assigned to particular services. Consequently, quality of service must be degraded in response to growing volume of requests for such services over and above an established limit. As the above-mentioned architectures focus on providing QoS as requested by application, they do not take an advantage of a possible aggregation of resources due to commonality between user requests for a particular service.
For example, it would be desirable to determine commonality for the usage history of a particular multimedia content, e.g., bursts of requests within short time intervals, the proximity of origination addresses of requests, etc. In addition, the architectures described above do not allow for dynamic monitoring and recording of resource consumption for individual services as well as for groups of related services, with the purpose of calculating cost of service for individual clients.
Thus, it would be highly desirable to provide a resource management mechanism for widely distributed resources that leverages the strengths of the next generation of Internet, and further, a system that enables coordination of all system resources for dynamic polling, re-assignment and release of resources, consequently, to provide a QoS requested by an application.
Prior approaches to resource management had focused on the independent optimization of individual resources in an operating system -whether centralized or distributed. Later approaches have provided higher level models for independent resource management but lack the coordination of multiple resources. For example, although RSVP provides end-to-end resource reservation as required by multimedia applications, it lacks the notion of coordination and co-allocation across resources such as CPU or disk.
Thus, it would be highly desirable to provide a novel resource management system that moves away from single resource, single node resource management to multiple resource, multiple node resource management.
It is an object of the invention to provide a system and method for managing resources in a distributed network that supports a utilities model for media services and accounts for virtual proximity over the next generation Internet. In an Internet multimedia utilities model, media services are provisioned to a paying subscribers mass in a manner such that the location of the provisioning party is irrelevant to subscribing parties as long as guarantees are made and met.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a mechanism for managing resources across heterogeneous servers that is capable of driving and fostering the Internet media utilities model, and particularly, a mechanism for administering, deploying, and configuring media servers in an Internet media utilities environment that permits leveraging virtual proximity over the resources provided by distributed media servers scattered throughout a network.
It is another object of the present invention to implement a novel approach to resource management by moving away from single resource, single node resource management to a multiple resource, multiple node resource management. This novel approach to resource management moves away from the optimization of single resource utilization to the statistical engineering of a set of resources. The present invention implements means to integrate resource management (i.e., typically low-level functionality) with high-level service management (i.e., application-level functionality).
The present invention relates to a service-oriented approach to multimedia resource management across distributed servers for the provisioning of Internet multimedia utilities to paying subscribers. Particularly, a system and method for the integrated management of services and resources across widely distributed media servers is provided. The system and method includes configuring heterogeneous media servers in terms of homogeneous service-oriented resource units referred to as xe2x80x9cservice unitsxe2x80x9d which are used to represent a resource allocation commitment from a participating server to be able to provision a particular media service on-demand. In the preferred embodiment, the service unit is represented in terms of an allocation vector whose members represent resource allocations for memory, disk, network, and CPU resources. A service unit represents an envelope of resource requirements as needed for provisioning of a media service with the generated resource envelope representing a bound set according to some criteria over a set of critical resources required for the provisioning of a media service. Accordingly, a different service unit is associated with each service with the same service unit definition possibly resulting in different resource envelopes across different servers supporting the same media service. Such resource envelope profiles may be time-variant or constant. The system of the invention additionally provides a mechanism for generating and adapting such resource envelopes for any media service.
According to the invention, a server is referred to as a meta-resource (xe2x80x9ca resource that provides resourcesxe2x80x9d) which refers to the service viewpoint and not the traditional reference to low-level resources such as memory, CPU, bandwidth, etc.. The ability (e.g., the necessary software) of any meta-resource to provision a media service is referred to as a capability with the notion of the service unit being the commitment to provision such service to a subscribing party.
It is also an object of the present invention to allow the meta-resource to remain autonomous. Thus, according to the principles of the invention, by providing application-level access control onto a meta-resource, the autonomy of meta-resources is preserved. To this end, each service unit is associated with metadata referred to as a xe2x80x9cservice signaturexe2x80x9d which is implemented to customize the service commitment of a meta-resource, e.g., by delivering hints to the meta-resource about resource management. For example, the service signature could be used to define access rights and characteristics for any particular service unit. Similarly, the service signature may recommend run-time compensation strategies to be used to update the resource envelope for this service unit under this meta-resource type at different loads. Thus, the service signature is one of the ways in which the present invention allows the integration of service management with resource management.
Advantageously, the present invention enables an arbitrary media server to participate and offer a position of value to an open and deregulated Internet utilities environment. To this end, the system of the present invention removes heterogeneity in resource management across heterogeneous servers. That is, according to the invention, the meta-resource may react to a remote administration authority or entity however, retain autonomous control of its resources. Thus, the invention permits the configuration of a meta-resource in terms of service units (i.e., service-oriented promises or commitments) to the authority while the fulfillment of these commitments is left to the meta-resource.
Furthermore, according to the invention, a meta-resource may be partitioned and administered as different and independent resource pools: a local resource pool implemented by the meta-resource to provide media services under local administration; and, a global resource pool implemented by the meta-resource to provide media services under remote administration.
Administration of these resource pools is enabled in terms of the type and number of service units, thus enabling the administrator of the meta-resource to enhance the value such meta-resource offers to the remote administration. Such administration may be based on some criteria such as the expected revenue, or some other cost metric. This results in individual meta-resources being entitled to various degrees of greediness toward acquisition of service requests by administration of their resource pools and their selection of service units and service capabilities.
The present invention is used to address the domain of Internet utilities and its application to multimedia services in a novel and useful manner. As an emerging set of Internet utilities is foreseen including Internet TV and Internet radio, to name a few, with applications ranging from distance learning, virtual reality, entertainment services, etc., the nature of a service utility is centered on the engineering of distribution channels. In traditional distribution channels such as the telephone network, control of the distribution is achieved via over-engineering and statistical multiplexing of resources. With the emergence of virtual proximity, the present invention makes possible and desirable the statistical over-engineering of end-to-end resources while providing a new revenue participation model for meta-resources while fostering the proliferation of meta-resources.